By Riley Kaminer
Have you ever been using ChatGPT and gotten sick of typing? One North Miami startup has got you covered, quite literally.
Meet publicly-traded Innovative Eyewear, which has developed ChatGPT-enabled eyewear under the brand Lucyd. Their frames contain voice-activated AI that aims to enhance your productivity by making it easier to multitask. Coming in prescription and sunglass variety, the glasses have a four speaker array that provides open ear audio – no buds to be seen – with two crisp mics. They also have an accompanying app, which is free during its open beta.
Users can deploy voice commands just like the text prompts they would write on ChatGPT’s website. Lucyd is offering a wide-range of ChatGPT-enabled frames, starting at $199.
“The future of eyewear is smart,” Harrison Gross, Innovative Eyewear’s CEO, told Refresh Miami. “One day, everyone will be wearing eyewear that is enhanced with some kind of technology features.”
Gross drew parallels between the world of eyewear and that of watches. “Smartwatch sales have overtaken regular watch sales for the first time this year,” he noted. “Traditional eyewear will also be replaced with eyewear that does more. The extra utility you get makes glasses so much more useful and handy that it becomes a no-brainer to upgrade.”
In a sea of expensive eyewear produced by monopolistic companies, Gross expressed pride in creating a high-quality product at an affordable price.
“[Eyewear] is a product that usually has a tremendous markup,” said Gross [pictured above]. “Most traditional eyeglasses are manufactured for under $10 and they end up being sold for hundreds of dollars in many cases. We don’t have as much of an egregious markup – we use more of that purchase price to add additional technology into the frame. So you end up with a product that does a lot more but it doesn’t cost any more.”
Gross and his 10-person team knew very soon after ChatGPT’s public launch that integrating it into eyewear would be a game changer. “We saw an immediate opportunity to expand the function of our glasses through AI,” he said.
“The human voice has evolved over millions of years, and it’s our most effective communication tool. By making ChatGPT voice accessible and having the responses be audible through the glasses really liberated chat GPT from being anchored to the desktop computer. Now it’s accessible anytime, anywhere. We thought that was a really powerful idea, and the market responded in kind.”
Gross founded the company in 2017 and started selling its first smart eyewear in 2018. He believes that the brand really speaks to the Miami lifestyle: a bright sunny environment where it feels great to walk around town with music in your ears. He also noted that Miami is one of the biggest eyewear markets in the US.
“Overall, the energy of Miami really speaks to what we’re doing,” Gross asserted. “It’s a place where people come to achieve things and change things for the better.”
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